Gloom of Kilforth

Gloom Of Kilforth is a fantasy adventure game where you have to go on sagas, exploring locations, following rumours and levelling up your character so you can fight the ‘boss’ at the end. You need to achieve this in 25 days before your world is completely consumed by Gloom – hence the name of the game.

Gloom of Kilforth – Set-up & Gameplay

The playing area, and location cards, are set out in a 5×5 grid – with 25 locations in total. You choose a character and a class, you take your starting items, place your standee on the centre location and your ready play nice quick and simple set up.

In Gloom of Kilforth, you also have a saga quest made up of four chapters and you need to complete this quest before you can take on the ancient boss. You have action points equal to your health so if you lose health you lose AP. Almost everything you do costs AP, so staying healthy is important.

Using an AP to move into a location then requires you to reveal a card of the matching type, for example, mountain, badlands, plains or forest. This card could reveal an event, a stranger or even an enemy.

So these cards give the chance to interact with them and if successful you can gain, gold, items and many items to help you on your quest. One of the nice things about these cards is they are multi-use, most cards will give you two choices of reward.

One of the choices is to take them in your hand as a rumour. Rumours help you achieve your saga quest which you need to complete to allow you to tackle the Ancient end boss mentioned above.

Rumours can also help in other ways, they will give you a location and when you arrive at that location you can exchange the rumour for the benefit on the card, this could be a spell, a title, a weapon and more. You can even meet up with fellow heroes and exchange items.

When all the AP is used you make camp and end the turn as nightfall commences. Nightfall is when gloom takes over a location. Different things can happen like enemies appearing, events take place and plot twists can reveal themselves.

Gloom of Kilforth – Final Thoughts

I wanted to love this game, I really did. But I don’t think it’s a great game like I expected, just a very good game. It has many things in its favour, as a solo game playable in under an hour it’s fine. The play time for four players is a let-down though and that’s a shame as that’s my usual group size.

The game is fun, it tells a very immersive story and once you have all the rules ironed out it can flow nicely. Any fans of card games will get great enjoyment out of this and Tristan Hall has done a fabulous job.